It was unusually and pleasantly cool when I went for my walk just before 8 o’clock this morning. Overcast and with a slight mist on my face. A respite from most mornings when the sun is already beating down hot and glaring from the sky at that hour. It won’t last long. In a few hours, the clouds will have burned away and the temperature will be in the mid to high 30s.

This week every year feels like the lead up to Christmas for its levels of busyness. The last week of school each year somehow always coincides with me having more than normal amounts of editing and writing work. It’s not that I perceive that there’s more work because I’m so busy doing other things. My records show that, year after year, one of my busiest work weeks of the year is also the last week of school. Maybe the writers I work with are also racing to complete their writing projects before the end of their or their kids’ academic years.

When the girls were little, the last week of school involved a day-long parent-student-teacher excursion to a water park, preparation for the end of year school performance, the one-day medieval festival that we, the parents’ association, organized, and finally a parents’ association convivencia, to which we all brought and shared food, had a barbecue and got sozzled – in the baking sun.

Now that the girls are older, my duties are more of a chauffeuring nature. No longer in the village school only a one-minute walk from our house, their secondary school is 25km away. As the school year draws to a close, trips to that town have increased – for evening graduation prep (for Lily), get togethers with friends, end of year parent-teacher meetings, and so on. Then there’s Katie to her tennis lessons 40km in the opposite direction. Plus the dog’s annual rabies vaccination lands this week each year. Luckily, the roads are good and we have some good music and podcasts to listen to.

To make matters slightly more crazy this year, we’re leaving next week for 10 weeks. We’ve never left Sanlucar for such a long time before so I’m in the process of getting the house ready to close it up. At least I haven’t had to do much grocery shopping this week, as I’m running down the food cupboards and the fridge. I’m setting up an irrigation system to water the 50 potted plants on my patio (I didn’t realize I had 50 until I set about the rather fiddly business of setting up the system). I still need to lift the dinghy and kayaks out of the water and store them until we come back. And there’s the packing, of course – not only of clothes and whatnot, but everything I will need to be able to carry on working while I’m away. Somewhere, in the midst of it all, as with every other year, I find the time to sit at my desk and meet my work deadlines.

The craziness of this time of the year is suffused with optimism and looking forward. All three of us are looking forward to the end of the school year for a shake-up of a routine that has started to feel like a drudge. All three of us, for different reasons, have had a tougher than expected year, so we’re looking forward to the end of school perhaps more than other years. A miscalculation on my part, however, means that, rather than having a few days to relax at home, and swim in the pool and the river, we’re leaving Sanlucar the very first day of the school holidays. Silly me.

Four more days of school…and summer, here we come!!